30 May 2012

SharePoint MetaData Creator Improves Search And Document Analysis

Today I am proud to tell you that kalmstrom.com Business Solutions has begun developing an add-on that automatically will extract SharePoint metadata from any document uploaded to a SharePoint site. This new product will highly improve the value and usefulness of any SharePoint site. You can find a demonstration of the prototype at the end of this blog post.
SharePoint Search requires metadata
A SharePoint site is an excellent platform for sharing and storage of documents, but when it grows big it is often difficult to get an overview of the documents and find the right one among all you have stored on your site. The reason for this is that the SharePoint Search feature is not very good if you don't add metadata, like keywords, to your documents. And this is not done as often as it should be.
SharePoint metadata is too seldom added
To add metadata to documents manually is both boring and time consuming, so often people avoid doing it or do it inconsistently. The result is that the organization cannot take full advantage of their site's metadata driven SharePoint Search feature.

Automatic SharePoint metadata
To help customers get more out of their investment and make the SharePoint Search more effective, Peter Kalmstrom, CEO of kalmstrom.com Business Solutions, wants to develop a MetaData Creator. With this tool SharePoint metadata is extracted automatically, so that users don't have to add it manually.
New button for metadata extraction
The MetaData Creator adds a new feature to SharePoint, and if you activate it a button for automatic metadata extraction is created. When you use the MetaData Creator, keywords are extracted from a text with just a click on that button. In the finished product it will be possible to define how the SharePoint metadata will be extracted, for example what type of keywords should be used.

How the MetaData Creator works
This is how the prototype functions:

Upload a file to SharePoint.

When the upload is finished a dialog is shown. Press the MetaData Creator button, "Extract Metadata".

Now the MetaData Creator will make a semantic analysis of the text you have selected and add relevant keywords in the Enterprise keyword field of the dialog. These metadata are then used by the SharePoint Search feature.

The MetaData Converter might ask you to select the correct meaning of a word. It could be a name of a town that exists in several countries or something like that.

Click Save.

Also for document analysis
With the MetaData Creator your future SharePoint Searches will be much more accurate. But you can also use the tool to get a better grasp of the content of your SharePoint site and get more out of existing documents.

Microsoft certified SharePoint specialist
Peter Kalmstrom has long experience of working with and developing for SharePoint, and he has earned all the available Microsoft certifications for SharePoint 2010. He also has a team of skilled developers and testers assisting him, so I am sure this new tool will be useful to many companies and organizations. The prototype is just a first step of course, and more functionality will be added during the continued development.

We welcome your input
The kalmstrom.com team always appreciates feed-back, so your comments on the MetaData Creator project are very welcome. Either leave them here as blog comments or contact us via e-mail. We are looking forward to hearing from you, and I hope you are looking forward to hearing more about the MetaData Creator in future blog articles!